Results[]
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Ulti's Analysis[]
| Division | Contest Final |
|---|---|
| Match # | 127 |
| Match Date | Wednesday, May 13, 2020 |
| Oracle Expectations |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 59.87% 51 for - 2 against |
| GameFAQs Prediction |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 37.14% |
| User Votes |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 5877 The Witcher 3 - 4131 |
| Anonymous Votes |
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - 5296 The Witcher 3 - 5184 |
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fvTxv46ano
Simply because I feel like posting one final list, here is every tournament final we've ever had. I'm cheating with a couple contests, but so what?
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1002-tournament-final-mario-vs-link
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1367-tournament-final-cloud-strife-vs-sephiroth
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1663-tournament-final-chrono-trigger-vs-final-fantasy-vii
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1780-tournament-final-link-vs-cloud-strife
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2019-tournament-final-sephiroth-vs-ganondorf
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2128-tournament-final-mario-vs-crono
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2131-tournament-of-champions-final-link-vs-sephiroth
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2455-tournament-final-the-legend-of-zelda-vs-final-fantasy
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2561-tournament-final-samus-aran-vs-solid-snake
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2566-battle-royale-final
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/2925-tournament-final-link-cloud-l-block-snake
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3306-contest-final-link-crono-snake-cloud
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3508-contest-final-ffvii-zelda-lttp-zelda-oot-ffx
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/3856-contest-final-link-vs-cloud-strife
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4195-game-of-the-decade-super-smash-bros-brawl-vs-the-legend-of
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/4572-final-rounds-final-mario-vs-bowser-link-vs-ganondorf
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/5266-character-battle-ix-final-draven-vs-solid-snake-vs-samus
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6177-best-game-ever-final-undertale-vs-zelda-ocarina-of-time
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6720-best-year-in-gaming-final-2001-vs-1998
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/7387-final-battle-link-vs-cloud
No real reason. Just felt like pulling this all up.
Final matches are generally boring, if not screwey. Very, very few of these matches have been any good, and usually by this point we already know what's winning the contest -- even in years where the winner is out of left field. Undertale and Draven stick out, but when going through those contests live we knew what was coming.
In this final, we all knew Breath of the Wild was going to cap off its run with a win -- only final percentages mattered. When the poll first started it looked like Zelda was going to deliver another giga-beating and deliver a swift 60-40 asswhipping to Witcher 3. 60-40 in a final, if you look at the list here, is a huge blowout. It's very hard to get much better than that in the finals of a contest.
But once Witcher 3 weathered the early storm for a few hours, it did the unthinkable. No, it didn't win the match or come close -- but it did make Breath of the Wild look human, which hadn't happened in this contest even once to this point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHat-k8wcFw
"Even a god-king can bleed." -redrocket
With the assistance of Europe and the fanbase rallying their balls off, Witcher 3 was able to turn a 60-40 blowout into a very, very respectable loss of 56-44. Breath of the Wild proved itself at or close to Ocarina of Time's strength for this entire contest, and Witcher 3 actually made it look mortal. I know the fans of Witcher were upset, but this is legitimately an amazing accomplishment. As a random side note, the Witcher series just passed 50 million units sold after only three games. To put that in perspective, it took the Resident Evil series 683 games to get 100 million in sales.
All that said, this contest was the Breath of the Wild Invitational, and though a lot of people are tired of Zelda always winning contests, that sentiment tends to not be there as much when something gets to win for the first time. People were happy about Link in 2002. People were happy about Majora's Mask. People were happy about Breath of the Wild. Hell, people were even happy about Ocarina in 2009. It was such a mismatch though compared to the rest of the field that I can't wait to see this thing up against some 90s games. The obvious duel we need to have is Breath vs Ocarina, but I would also love to see it against Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7, Link to the Past, Pokemon. and so on.
All in all, this was a decent enough contest, though the vote totals blew. There was just one more thing to take care of... bonus match!
Ctes's Analysis[]
The final match of Game of the Decade II came down to this:
Aside from such things, the final match of these contests is very rarely exciting, and this is no different. I don’t mind though, as long as the rest of the contest has been good, this is just another match. Breath of the Wild was absolutely never going to drop this match. The result you see is performed by Witcher 3 on steroids. Maybe it could’ve pulled something similar off in any losing match today, I don’t know, it didn’t in 2015, but I’m willing to bet making the final match helped. It’s easier to rally for the final of a contest than anything else.
Witcher 3 rallied perhaps more than any other game has done in the contest. It could have flipped a lot of matches. Who knows how it would have went if these two were closer on natural strength. Breath of the Wild could probably counter and the match would have been very different. As it was, Breath of the Wild was never in danger.
Let’s just try to put things in perspective here. The Witcher 3 had just shown that it would lose the board vote against even Skyrim, but Breath of the Wild is also pretty bad with the board vote. Any obvious winner to the contest is. Link himself does notoriously bad in the opening minutes because we’re so tired of seeing him in these contests. It’s hard to tell what won the board vote today, obviously, but I’d honestly bet most of the board wanted Witcher 3 to win despite how bad it looked until now. It’s entirely possible it didn’t favor any of them in particular.
In any base, Breath of the Wild was close to 60% at first and went well above it a bit after the freeze, which does suggest the typical early vote boost for the non-favorite. Then look at where the match ended. Witcher 3 did everything it could to make a match of this, rallying as hard as it could. There were few cuts and stalls, but the lead never stopped growing on the large scale. Witcher 3 teared percentage apart though, especially in the night hours where Europe matters the most. The game is from Poland and it shows. It’s a lot bigger there than in NA where Breath of the Wild won big.
It’s difficult to determine if Witcher 3 is the second strongest game in the bracket before rallying but it absolutely is with them. Breath of the Wild got almost 68% on Ultimate with SFF. Breath of the Wild looked to get well above 60% before all the Witcher rallying, but the Europe hours would have obviously still happened. If Witcher 3 also boosted from being in the final, then it looks pretty close to Ultimate. It’s a shame we didn’t get a third place bonus match, it would’ve taught us a bit. We would need a direct match to figure this out, but it’s for certain that Witcher 3 wins the match, it’s probably a lot easier to rally for and even a small one could do the difference.
No one noticed initially because we just click on our favorite game and vote, but when you clicked on one of the games, but didn’t finalize your vote yet, the moon from Majora’s mask would hover over the picture of the game you didn’t pick. Allen had to come into the stats topic and tell us, but it was a really cool little Easter egg which teased the bonus match.
The Witcher 3 did lose today, but it is without a doubt the star of the contest in my eyes. I don’t see how it could be anything else really, unless you want to pick Breath of the Wild for being even more dominant than we thought, but everyone knew it would have an easy time. Witcher 3 wasn’t even favored to get this far. Not only did it manage to get here, it creamed all competition, completely neglected rallying against it and then blasted a very successful rally out itself. It’s almost definitely the strongest Western game on the site, that wasn’t exactly a big feature before this decade. I’ve seen people suggest it as a top 10 game overall, that’s probably a good bit too much, but it’s high up there for sure, and could possibly rally its way to top 10 given the right circumstances.
Breath of the Wild is a good contender for most predictable contest winner yet, though it has been a lock many times before. In the end it let something get closer to it than Link did in 2018, but he also didn’t have this big a rally against him. It has not been in doubt what would win this contest at any point since Breath of the Wild released in 2017 and I’m sure people expected it even before it came out. A lot of that has to do with the fact that it’s a Zelda game of course. Majora’s Mask clearly shouldn’t have the best game in the field in 2010 but won the contest regardless. Zelda is that dominant here. It’s more dominant now than ever through a mix of releasing a game this well received again 19 years after Ocarina and Time and the only things that could rival the Zelda franchise declining due to lack of relevance. We can hope, but I seriously doubt that a well liked remake of the first 10% of Final Fantasy VII is going to come close to closing that gap.
Breath of the Wild did not only win because it’s a Zelda game though, while it certainly helped its case I’m sure. This decade it’s not just us, it’s generally accepted as the best of the decade. Take a look here:
https://www.metacritic.com/feature/best-videogames-of-the-decade-2010s
Breath of the Wild did significantly better than anything else on average. It’s incredible how well received the game is. The Legend of Zelda is not big here for no reason and Breath of the Wild reminded us all that. It’s not universally liked obviously, but nothing really is. The people against it are a vocal minority. It’s hard to deny how big a game it is and it absolutely deserves its title. Congratulations!
Safer777's Analysis[]
This is. The Final Match. After all this time it came down to this. Who would win? Okay let's be real from Day 1 we all knew BOTW would win barring a rally. So the only question was which game would be here. Most had either Skyrim or Witcher 3. As I said in my previous analysis, Witcher is damn popular now and had no trouble against Skyrim. So we all thought how it would do here. The Crew had BOTW winning with around 58 and most people that BOTW would win with around 60 too. But as you can see this didn't happened.
So for the match. Witcher managed to score above 44 which to tell the truth nobody expected this high. I had BOTW winning with around 60 too. So yeah Witcher 3 did really good here. I would like for it to score above 45 but hey. Also one curious result. BOTW in USA had around 60 but in UK around 45! In fact in most countries Witcher 3 did won. So yeah Americans REALLY like Nintendo. I am not sure why. Sure Nintendo did really well with NES back in the day but decades have passed since then. And yeah their first party games always do well but still when people think which console to buy pretty sure they think either PS or Xbox and then a Nintendo console. At least here. I guess since Americans have more money than most they just buy everything? Eh whatever. So yeah. We all knew the winner but still it would be hilarious if another game had won. Now some said that the developers of Witcher would rally because they had it said back in 2015 but seriously, you think anyone would care for a contest in this site? The last time someone really cared was back in 2015. Sure we had some rallies too and some of them affected the results too but really small ones. Pretty sure the developers have you know anything else better to do.
Also the final match had the most votes which is around 30.000. BUT don't be fooled the registered users have double votes. So it is closer to 20.000 actually which is amazing for this site too! I mean we started with 14.000 votes which is what we are used too. So it is true that the contest does bring people to this site and that is good I guess. Man I still remember when in some old contests even boring matches had like 80.000 votes. Still seems that the site is very slowly losing people but it can continue going on for a lot more years since us regulars we just can't leave. So anyways to recap congrats to BOTW and congrats to Witcher 3 too that kept fighthing untill the end.